Enterprise workgroups, which include corporate departments and small/medium-sized businesses, previously have been largely unable to enjoy the benefits of storage consolidation because of the cost and complexity involved in setting up a SAN. By combining iSCSI/IP and Fibre Channel technologies, the Cisco SN 5428 lets these organizations use well-known and understood IP networking concepts to take advantage of all the performance and feature benefits of storage consolidation, at a significant cost savings to previous methods. Benefits include easier management, more efficient storage utilization, and centralized backup -- all resulting in increased business resilience and lowered total cost of ownership.

"IDC believes that the next phase of SAN adoption will occur for small and medium-size organizations where top-of-the-line performance is seldom a goal and extended life of today's technologies is an important business objective to manage costs," said Robert Gray, research director at IDC. "By combining IP/GbE interfaces for midrange servers connectivity and Fibre Channel ports for storage and high-end server connection, the Cisco SN 5428 uniquely addresses the needs of the workgroup SAN market and will accelerate SAN adoption in this space."

The Cisco SN 5428 is a multi-protocol storage networking platform offering two Gigabit Ethernet ports, for connectivity to standard TCP/IP networks, and eight 1 or 2-gigabit Fibre Channel fabric switch ports with integrated components from QLogic Corp. These Fibre Channel ports support switch fabric features such as E_port connectivity and zoning or can be used simply as a direct interface for tape and disk-based storage devices.

The support for both iSCSI and Fibre Channel in the Cisco SN 5428 gives customers who do not have extensive SAN expertise the ability to build and manage storage networks using their familiarity with IP-networking tools such as SNMP-based management, IPSec, and Quality of Service (QoS). For organizations with more Fibre Channel expertise, the Cisco SN 5428 provides them the flexibility to incorporate more advanced Fibre Channel technology features to build and manage multi-layer, multi-protocol storage networks.

The Cisco SN 5428 includes intelligent network services such as advanced security, VLANs, and QoS to help to make storage networks more scalable, secure, and manageable. Addressing security and reliability, the Cisco SN 5428 includes support for well-known and understood IP-based measures such as RADIUS and TACACS+ authentication, access control lists, VLANs and VLAN Trunking Protocol, and support for high-availability clusters. In addition, the Cisco SN 5428 supports traditional SAN security features such as LUN Mapping, LUN Masking, and Fibre Channel zoning.

The Cisco SN 5428 works with Cisco's industry-leading breadth of iSCSI drivers available for Microsoft Windows 2000 and NT, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, IBM AIX, and several flavors of Linux operating systems. This driver support is key to deploying this technology across heterogeneous server environments that many customers have today.